USING GEOGEBRA in TEACHER TRAINING Dr. Mustafa DOĞAN, Dr. Erol KARAKIRIK

Introduction We would like to share our ideas by presenting some of our primary trainee mathematics teachers’ works with GeoGebra.

Dynamic geometry is introduced to primary trainee mathematics teachers’ in many Turkish Universities as part of computer based maths education by mainly using Cabri and Sketchpad software packages. However, there was not a formal dynamic geometry course as part of the University curriculum for a long time. Hence, we started a special “dynamic geometry” course in Selcuk University, Faculty of Education, at Primary Mathematics Department in Since then final year trainee teachers have been taking this course every academic year specifically to learn about dynamic geometry.

At the beginning of the course trainee teachers are given some introductory lectures about dynamic geometry. We have employed GeoGebra in our course since it was free and easily available. These lectures also covered the basic features of GeoGebra software and provide explanatory samples. GeoGebra software was translated by us then to Turkish to be used in this course. Students were initially expected to work freely for two weeks with GeoGebra (using computer laboratory in the lectures hours) to construct their own works.

It is observed that; students could easily use the simple features of Turkish version of GeoGebra during the course. This course also offered them opportunities to explore the advanced features of GeoGebra with the help of the lecturer.

Each student’s work usually consisted of at least 10 different GeoGebra worksheets including both geometric and algebraic operations. Thus, more than 3000 GeoGebra worksheets samples have been constructed by around 600 trainee teachers for the last three years. Therefore, we have great opportunity to present some selected samples from the students’ original works and share and explore the ideas associated with the use of GeoGebra at the primary mathematics department.

the students’ explorations and ideas about the use of GeoGebra at university and in teacher training. the potential applications of GeoGebra and the development of instructional resources in primary classes.

We will provide original worksheets of trainee teachers. These worksheets may provide insights about Turkish students’ main interests about dynamic geometry, successful use of GeoGebra, accuracy of construction, visualization exploration and discovery (either guided or completely open-ended), proof transformation and simulation.

The works also show some of Turkish students’ deficiencies, struggles, misunderstandings, misconceptions and misuse.

We have manly used GeoGebra as a problem solving tool in our course. A few interesting examples are given below to exemplify the original students’ works such as a construction and visualization and its solution, a wrong solution, and a proof.

Problem 1: Find the area of a triangle inside a prism.

Problem 2: Prove that tangents drawn to y2=4x parabola from the Point A (-1, 5) that lies on the line x=1 are perpendicular to each other.

Problem 3: Find the area between functions f(x)=cos(2x+1) and g(x)=sin(2x+1) in the interval [п, 2п ].

We have used GeoGebra worksheets to assess the students in our course. As part of the assessment, students were required to pinpoint the difficulties of GeoGebra software and make suggestions to improve it. Hence, we can also provide suggestions made by our students to introduce new features, tools and commands for GeoGebra.

Thank You very much